Your later post (#83) regarding the benefits of CO2 for the biosphere and trends in global warming over the past 8 years wasn’t very good IMO. I’m surprised nobody here has challenged you on those points.

That’s because he’s correct. Well, the declining temps over the past 8 years is a bit of a joke, but it’s still true.

Reid, thanks for the links (#68) — I’ll get to those straight away. Your later post (#83) regarding the benefits of CO2 for the biosphere and trends in global warming over the past 8 years wasn’t very good IMO. I’m surprised nobody here has challenged you on those points.

One of the points that caught my eye in Eichenwald’s book was Andrew Fastow’s viciousness to anyone who opposed him. He got a Merrill Lynch analyst fired for reducing Enron from a Buy to a Hold.

FWIW, I’ve seen this attributed to Lay, not Fastow (analysts name is John Olson, I think). Other firms (UBS Warburg, for example) did fire analysts in similar fashion, but I’m not sure if/who at Enron got them fired.

I plan to catch the movie version of “Enron – the Smartest Guys in the Room” ASAP.

A scientist’s response to criticism can be very revealing. In one of my first talks at an international conference, I was presenting a paper where I was explaining some experimental observations I had made. A similar problem had been addressed in a book that had just been published by one of the big wigs in the field. When I showed the preprint to a colleague, he quicly faxed me the relevant pages of the book, pointing out that the equations were different than mine! The difference amounted to a factor of two that would cancel two effects if it was there. I checked an rechecked my equations, and was pretty sure I was right. When I presented my paper, that guy was in the audience! I was just a young researcher, and I was totally panicked at the prospect of him raising his hand at the question period, and demolishing my paper! But quite the opposite, he didn’t ask any questions, and we had a nice chat afterwards, and had a very nice relationship from that day on. By the way, I had the right equations…

The interesting thing is that the mistake originated in a paper published a few years earlier by other authors, and was propagated in a number of subsequent papers. People just cut and pasted the equations, and nobody noticed the missing factor of two (whereas I derived the equations myself). Those erroneous equations were used to model experimental results. Needless to say the agreement wasn’t quite striking, but they all got away with handwaiving explanations about inaccurate data etc. Those were all peer reviewed papers in very good journals.

About Enron, I was deeply involved in the fiber optics bubble of 1999-2000 (the company I founded was acquired by another one that went public in 2000). I can tell you there was a lot of corruption around. Suppliers were paid in pre-IPO stock, and I mean not the company itself, but the executives! There was just too much money flying around. Friends of mine who also had their own company realized what was going on: all their customers showed them the same sales forecast, as if they were all going to sell the same systems to the same customers. So that made the market look ten times bigger. That made no sense and it was obvious that it was going to crash soon. They sold the company for cash, at just the right time. Now you want me to believe that the head of Nortel (forgot his name) wasn’t aware of it when he sold $150M worth of stock at the end of 2000?

One of the points that caught my eye in Eichenwald’s book was Andrew Fastow’s viciousness to anyone who opposed him. He got a Merrill Lynch analyst fired for reducing Enron from a Buy to a Hold. You see that kind of mentality from time to time. In my experience, people with nothing to fear don’t get nasty over criticism.

I get that too. From the Climate Audit crowd! (Just kidding.)

The same think happened with a Nobel Prize winner at LTCM slamming a MS student who questioned the ability of LTCM to continue “picking nickels off the street” because of efficient market theory. In the end, the MS student and efficient capital markets won over the blustering Nobel Prizer. As recounted in WHEN GENIUS FAILED.

Jeff Skilling reacted the same way to some naysayers in meetings as well. Unfortunately, there are a lot of HBSers (don’t know if he went there) who put forward a surface story of rational analysis but if you start to really dig into it to determine the level of insight, consideration of alternative hypotheses, etc. they get upset. I think it’s a problem for business that we have this type of irrationality, but it’s not surprising given human nature. All that said, the more corporate cultures can move away from this silliness and to more dispassionate analysis, the better, for us as a society capitalizing on the results of their bets.

The latest AGW alarmist news is that poison ivy is thriving due to global warming. It is the scare of the day carried by dozens of big media outlets. Here is a sample: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13046200/

This is typical reporting. While it is true it obscures the truth by omission. Virtually all plant life on planet earth is expanding rapidly. Due to increased CO2 plant biomass has surged 6% in the last 20 years as observed by satelites. AMAZING! But not something that feeds alarm so it is an arcane fact unknown to most. Including most scientists who opine on global warming. Pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is, in reality, the ultimate “Green” activity.

And while I am talking about the media when was the last time you heard that the global average temperature has not risen in 8 years? In fact if you average the last 8 years the average global temperature has fallen. Indisputable fact confirmed by both the satelite and ground based data.

I’m not a statistician but maybe Steve could do some stats on the last 8 years showing a decline in global average temperatures. Incidentally, not a single scenario presented by the IPCC predicted the last 8 years of average temperature decline.

So when a certain scientist wrote to journals claiming that I was “dishonest” and a tool of the oil industry, that encouraged me to continue probing into what was going on.